Closing summary
We are wrapping up our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. We will be back on Saturday, as nationwide protests are planned. Here are some of Friday’s developments:
Donald Trump formally approved Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid for US Steel on Friday, signing an executive order to allow what Trump has called a “partnership” between the companies to move forward.
Tennessee state representative Justin Jones attended a hearing in Nashville on Friday for Kilmar Ábrego García, and accused the Trump administration of “drumming up these politicized charges”.
Trump claimed to have known “everything” about Israel’s overnight attack on Iran, but The Atlantic reported that Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this week “he believed that a deal was still possible and didn’t want to risk a wider war”. While Trump insists a nuclear deal, to replace the 2015 one he scuttled during his first term, remain possible, an unnamed diplomat told the Atlantic: “Israel just killed their negotiators.”
The former Voice of America correspondent Steve Herman reports that the United States Agency for Global Media “urgently called back to work the staff of the Voice of America’s Farsi language service” on Friday.
Marcos Leao, the first civilian detained by US marines since Trump deployed troops to California, is an army veteran who was on his way to a Veterans Affairs office when he crossed a yellow-tape boundary.
Video posted on Instagram on Friday gives a sense of the anger in east Los Angeles over sweeps in which federal border patrol agents are stopping people on the streets and forcing them to prove that they are US citizens.
About 2,000 anti-Trump protests are planned across the United States on Saturday, timed to coincide with the military parade in Washington DC the president is throwing himself on the 250th anniversary of the US army’s founding, and his own 79th birthday.
Trump approves sale of US Steel to Japanese rival he opposed on campaign trail
Donald Trump formally approved Nippon Steel’s $14.9bn bid for US Steel on Friday, signing an executive order saying what Trump has called a “partnership” between the companies to move forward if the companies signed an agreement with the treasury department resolving national security concerns posed by the deal.
The companies later announced they had signed the agreement, fulfilling the conditions of Trump’s directive and effectively garnering approval for the merger.
“We look forward to putting our commitments into action to make American steelmaking and manufacturing great again,” the companies said in the statement, thanking Trump.
It remains unclear how the final deal is different from the takeover of the US company by the Japanese one that was blocked by then-president Joe Biden after the 2024 election, and which Trump had promised to stop in elected.
The Japanese financial news site Nikkei reported that Trump was simply “paving the way for the Japanese company to finalize its takeover of its American counterpart.”
One difference might be that the deal will give the US government a “golden share” in the company, a rarely used practice through which the government takes a stake in company.
“We have a ‘golden share’, which I control, the president controls,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “If that gives you total control, it’s 51% ownership by Americans.”
It was not immediately clear what structural element of the deal Trump was referring to, Reuters noted, but according to Trump the share means that Americans would have a 51% share in the ownership of the steelmaker.
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